Poland detains 2 Belarusian citizens flying drone over president’s residence in Warsaw

BERLIN (AP) — Polish authorities neutralized a drone flying above government buildings in Warsaw on Monday night, a spokesperson for the State Protection Services told The Associated Press.

Two employees of Poland’s State Protection Services working at the Belvedere castle, where the president resides, spotted the drone above the building and took steps leading to the detention of the operators, two Belarusian citizens, Col. Boguslaw Piorkowski said.

Poland is on high alert after multiple Russian drones crossed into the country last week in what European officials described as a deliberate provocation and causing NATO to send fighter jets to shoot them down.

Piorkowski said the drone flying over Warsaw on Monday night was not shot down, but landed after authorities apprehended the operators.

“The impression is that this is not something that flew in” from abroad but rather launched locally,” Katarzyna Pelczynska-Nalecz, Poland’s minister of development funds and regional policy told TVN 24, advising against rushing to conclusions or associating it to last week’s incursion.